Good Gathering

What You’ll Learn

Gain a fresh perspective on the potential for group sessions

Learn the building blocks of great group sessions

Learn seven nearly facilitation-free methods

Any significant undertaking requires groups of people to work together. But despite the importance of group sessions, most organizations have a limited palette of things people do when they’re in the same room together: presentations, discussion, brainstorming, status reports. The way we conduct group sessions often reinforces and repeats established patterns of thought and conversation. We feel trapped in meetings, audience members disengage, expertise remains in isolated pools, and projects yield little surprise.

In this seminar, Marc Rettig opens the door to a new world of methods, frameworks, and practices that create new possibilities and expand the set of potential outcomes for group sessions. Through examples, project stories, frameworks, and a wee bit of theory, you’ll learn several methods you can try right away and get pointed to resources for continued learning.

Gain a fresh perspective on the potential for group sessions

Learn the five microstructures that make up all group sessions

Look at group conversation through the lens of basic dialogue theory—“the fork in the road”

See how our typical group methods cover only a small part of what’s possible

Learn the building blocks of great group sessions

Get methods for using group size as a “material”

See how getting out of your chair can help—and doesn’t have to be weird

Discover ways to level power and engage all voices

Learn seven nearly facilitation-free methods

Get activities that quickly turn a collection of individuals into a working group

Learn a way to help people see one another across differences, silos, and labels

Learn simple activities that encourage any conversation to go deeper

If you or members of your team run workshops, present plans and reports, or gather people to work in meetings and workshops, you’ll gain new perspectives and practical methods from this seminar. If your work depends on collaboration, sponsorship, and participation from people outside your team, you’ll come away with fresh ideas for what can happen when people get together.

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Why Marc?

Marc’s long career has been guided by an interest in people, systems, communication, anthropology and the power of design. His current work is defined by a question — “How can we advance the practice of creating resilient health in social systems?” — a question which puts him on the frontier of applying design methods to social and strategic questions. Marc has been a leading figure in interaction design, user experience, and the use of ethnographic methods for strategic design. He is a founding faculty member of the MFA in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Practice in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design.